Critical Path First

Posted: November 13, 2025 | Author: epireve | Filed under: Product | Tags: rant | Comments Off on Critical Path First

We had double-digit user roles, three sides of a marketplace, and stakeholders who wanted the user journey to be perfect. I was confident we could do it all.

Spoiler: we couldn’t.

Here’s what I learned about actually shipping things.

The Perfect Journey Nobody Took

I was working on a re-platforming project – migrating users to a new system. We’d agreed on the feature set, built the roadmap, and everything looked good. Then stakeholders started emphasizing user experience. They wanted the journey to be perfect before launch.

Makes sense, right? Great UX is important.

So we spent weeks trying to find the right talent to nail the user experience. We had meetings about the journey. We discussed flows. We obsessed over details.

Meanwhile, the real problem was sitting right in front of us: we had no users to onboard. We had no one to even test the system with.

I knew this. Deep down, I knew. But I held onto the UX focus because… well, it felt like the “right” thing to prioritize. Stakeholders wanted it. It sounded smart.

Then I got stuck. Really stuck. And I finally had to voice it out.

“Look,” I said, “there’s a thousand problems we could look at. But we need to hyper-prioritize what we’re actually trying to do here.”

The reality? We needed users. We needed core development done. We couldn’t polish a journey if nobody was on it.

I expected pushback. Instead, the stakeholders got it immediately once we talked about reality and focus. It was easy – almost too easy. The hard part was admitting I’d been chasing the wrong thing.

Back to the Drawing Board

That moment forced us to go back to basics. We had a chicken-and-egg situation: a complex marketplace with three sides, and everything felt critical.

So we asked ourselves two questions:

1. What’s the lowest hanging fruit we can learn from?
2. What’s the 20% of effort that’ll give us 80% of the impact?

The answer was uncomfortable: focus on the operator side first. The internal users and partners who could actually run the platform. Get them onboarded. Get them operating. Let everything else wait.

If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

We channeled all our resources toward that one user group. Not three sides at once. Not the perfect journey for everyone. Just the shortest path to something that works.

What This Looks Like Now

Every Monday, we align. Every Friday, we do show and tell. Every month, we adjust to reality – market changes, stakeholder needs, resource constraints.

It’s not comfortable. It feels like biting glass every week, honestly. Monthly priorities shift. We’re constantly firefighting.

But we’re getting better. 1% every day. We’ll try our best.

The ritual that keeps us honest: We keep asking those two questions. Lowest hanging fruit? 20% for 80%? And we protect the path to that outcome ruthlessly.

Real Talk

Look, you don’t need to be perfect at this. I’m not. I still get pulled into things that don’t matter. Just last week, I had to say no to meetings I kept getting roped into – meetings where I couldn’t contribute anything meaningful.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: focus isn’t about doing everything. It’s about doing the right thing first.

Look at your sprint right now. Your roadmap. Your backlog. What’s actually blocking you from shipping? What’s the critical path?

Start there. Let the rest wait.

Trust me – the perfect user journey will still be there next week. But if you don’t have users, it doesn’t matter anyway.

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